Having Their Noses Rubbed In It
In a comment to a post by Bitey, Koshersalaami asks:
“But why is it different? Why did the Floyd killing accomplish what the Garner killing didn’t?”
It’s different because of the sheer length of the video that depicts the absolute horror of the murder of an unarmed black man by a white cop and three uniformed accomplices.
Most people can’t or won’t stand in one place for more than three minutes.
This is 8 minutes and 46 seconds of a real live murder committed by someone who is sworn to protect and serve.
Due to the pandemic, the video was seen by a captive, homebound, audience who would ordinarily have escaped exposure to the stark obscenity of a brutal police street execution.
There are people who still can’t, or won’t, believe what the video requires them to witness. They’ll be in the jury pool needing to be weeded out by the pretrial process of ‘voir dire’.
White folks are accustomed to ignoring reports of such incidents, or denying the validity and veracity of the complaints and grievances that arise from such occurrences.
But then, it has always been black people who are aggrieved and doing the complaining….
Not this time…
Black people aren’t alone in seeking redress this time….
White Americans have been forced to see themselves and their hypocrisy in a way that runs contrary to everything they’ve been taught to believe about themselves and the country they live in.
No other video recording has managed to do this the way the one shot by Darnella Frazier has.
Many, for the first time, have been required to see themselves as black people see them….They not only don’t like what they see, they don’t like the idea that black people and the rest of humanity can see it as well.
White people are not comfortable with being confronted with the clear unambiguous and undeniable truth about the more than 400 years of their systemic racism and societal hypocrisy and denial….
It seems that finally, in this moment of being forced to see and face the truth about themselves, white people are coming to the realization that it is they who must put an end to this shit….
…And none of them are too happy about having their noses rubbed in it.
06/10/2020 @ 12:50 am
The Garner video is I believe at least that long and shows something very similar, the main difference being Pantaleo used an arm and Chauvin used a knee. Both long, both with other cops and medical techs standing around doing nothing, both with men saying they couldn’t breathe, and the Garner case, unlike the Floyd case, didn’t even result in an indictment. The difference may be that because people are home they all watched it. I was trying to figure out what difference Coronavirus made and that may be it.
It doesn’t matter if White people are comfortable with it, it matters that White people may finally be willing to do something about it. And opinions have changed wildly. This is from an article Tuesday (now yesterday) in the Washington Post:
“Only 39 percent of them approve of Trump’s approach, while 57 percent disapprove; 69 percent of them support the protests; and 68 percent of them say Floyd’s death reveals systemic police mistreatment of blacks.”
The above quote says “Only 39% of Them.” Of whom?
Of White people. Those are the Whites only numbers. The overall numbers are of course much higher.
And, though not by much of a margin, the majority of non-college-educated Whites disapprove of how Trump is handling the protests.
We are looking at a fundamental shift.
06/10/2020 @ 4:23 am
There are clear substantive and material dissimilarities between the videos:
None of the available videos of the arrest of Garner are as long as the police murder of Floyd.
Floyd is murdered during the video..
Garner dies after being taken to the hospital.
Garner, a huge man, is wrestled to the ground at the beginning of the video where police claim he was ‘resisting arrest’.
Floyd was on the ground with Chauvin’s knee on his neck and handcuffed behind his back for the entire 8 minutes and 46 seconds.
For more than 2 minutes Floyd had no pulse and had stopped breathing.
The look on Chauvin’s face as he murdered Floyd was clearly visible and menacingly sadistic.
No such view of the appearance of the NYPD officers was apparent in that video.
And yes, the COVID19 pandemic created a captive, homebound, audience that made a huge difference in viewership…
“It doesn’t matter if White people are comfortable with it, it matters that White people may finally be willing to do something about it.”
White people wouldn’t be willing to do something about it if they weren’t, in some way or another, made to feel uncomfortable with what they were forced to witness in the Frazier video of the murder of George Floyd.
06/10/2020 @ 5:36 pm
Another difference in the incidents, and the videos is that Floyd was removed from one of the vehicles, while wearing cuffs, and then placed on the ground where he was murdered. Garner was approached while standing in front of the store. Floyd went from sitting in the vehicle to being taken out across the street…etc. As bad as the Floyd video is, we tend to forget about what led up to it.